| |
|
|
How to Migrate Lotus Notes Documents to Microsoft Word or PDF
There are a number of scenarios in which an organisation may choose to migrate the data from existing Lotus Notes databases to Microsoft Word or PDF. These scenarios include:
- Migrating a Notes application to another platform - this scenario typically involves retaining the Notes data in a format that can be incorporated into an other application such as Microsoft Sharepoint, Documentum etc.
- Records retention - the data in a Notes application may need to be retained for a long number of years for compliance and legal reasons and a desire exists to store the data in a format that is more likely to survive the test of time and is not reliant on the Lotus Notes infrastructure still being available. An example of this could be contract documents needing to be available in 30 years time.
A well considered option is the transfer of the Notes documents to a Word document or, better still, to the PDF format or the Open Document Format (ODF). They could then be retained on CD, transferred to a document management system or some other solution.
The exporting of the data from a Lotus Notes database is not free of complexity. You need to:
- address the issue of retaining the fidelity of the data as presented in Notes when this is transferred to Word or PDF.
- deal with the issue of attachments which may be contained within the Notes documents
- deal with the issue that different forms and thus layouts may be used for the documents in the Notes database.
These issues are all resolved using Integra for Notes and a specific Integra profile designed to meet the export needs of a particular Notes application. While a profile can be created to perform an almost unlimited set of tasks, the Word Migration profile is designed to:
- create a Word/PDF document for each of the selected Notes documents in a Lotus Notes application including any or all of the fields on the document and in a layout defined within a Word template including fonts, colour schemes, labels etc.
- store these documents in a folder using a system generated file name according to a defined formula.
- Automatically detach to the file system any attachments found in each of the Notes documents, naming these with a similar naming convention.
- Create a hypertext link at the bottom of the Word document linking of the detached documents which were originally in the Notes document.
Since different applications will consist of different forms, each with different fields and layouts and since the naming convention of the created and detached files that are used may be specific to an organisation, the Integra profile needs to be customised to meet the specific needs of the customer.
Shireburn Software, the developers of Integra, provide a standard profile as an optional add-in to Integra for Notes, which is then further customised to meet the customer's requirements.
It should be noted that, since Lotus Notes and Microsoft Word use different storage and display methods for rich text elements such as tables, bullet points etc., the fidelity of this export to Word is never 100% identical to that originally in Notes. For more details, see this FAQ.
One significant advantage of the Integra approach is that, since the Integra profile that defines the data to be exported, the layout and the distribution options are all contained in the Integra database, no changes to the design of your current Lotus Notes application are required to export the data. This ensures that the touch costs for undertaking the export are as low as possible and that no version control issues effect the current Lotus Notes application.
Drop us a note to discuss your requirements >> email us. |
. |
|
FAQ# 0256
|
|
|
| |